[Nfbc-info] Bird Box

[Peacefulwoman89 at cox.net]

Hey NFB Fam,


I really think we can jump on the Bird Box wagon and make this a win-win.
What an opportunity to do outreach! There are so many possibilities here.
Think about it and talk about it with your chapter members. Let's make this
work for us and connect with people who want to take the Bird Box Challenge.


Lisa Irving 

-----Original Message-----
From: NFBC-Info <nfbc-info-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Frida Aizenman
via NFBC-Info
Sent: Saturday, January 5, 2019 10:43 AM
To: nfbc-info at nfbnet.org
Cc: Frida Aizenman <nfbfrida at gmail.com>
Subject: [Nfbc-info] Bird Box

Yesterday, I was watching the news in Telemundo, and I found out that,
courtesy of Netflix, after watching the movie Bird Box, millenniums walk
around everywhere with sleepshades, but no canes!
Read on:
Frida
'Bird Box' Ending Explained: How Movie Changed Book for the Worse The
Hollywood Reporter

January 04, 2019  1:10pm PT by  Andy Crump

How 'Bird Box' Tweaked the Book's Ending It's a small shift, but one that is
more important than you might think.
Courtesy of Netflix

It's a small shift, but one that is more important than you might think.
article
[This story contains spoilers for both Bird Box
  and A Quiet Place]

When the world's on fire and the only way to allay suicidal impulses stirred
up by induced psychosis is to shut your eyes, a blindfold is your best
chance of survival. We don't live in that world, thankfully, but that's not
stopping people from blindfolding themselves anyway to see if they can hack
it in a post-apocalypse scenario where eyesight's a bane rather than a boon;
they're caught up in the Bird Box challenge , the first quantifiable (and
totally absurd) byproduct of the Netflix original film's unexpected
popularity.

It's a near guarantee that Bird Box's inexplicable mass appeal will yield
better returns than social media trends as time moves on; the streaming
service has declared it their most popular film to date, a claim equally as
dubious as palatable. On one hand, Netflix hasn't yet verified the roughly
45,000,000 account figure they posted to Twitter
  the week after
Bird Box's premiere on Dec. 21. On the other, social media has gone full
goose bozo over the movie since it went to air. Putting too much stock in
Twitter reactions as a gauge of a pop culture totem's true popularity is a
rookie mistake, that's for certain, but when a movie like Bird Box forms
enough of a fan base to inspire its own self-titled challenge, well, that
movie's obviously doing something right .

Here, "something right" specifically refers to casting, perhaps, or speaks
to the temperature of the day and pop culture's increased fixation on
apocalypse, or maybe audiences liked A Quiet Place so much that what's
essentially "what if A Quiet Place but for eyeballs" has unintended built-in
allure. For all their doom and gloom, these films are, in their fashion,
optimistic: 
Mankind prevails
over evil, whether extraterrestrial or otherworldly, triumphant but steeled
for whatever comes next, be it more monsters, as in the case of A Quiet
Place, or a life confined within the walls and beneath the forest canopy of
a school for the blind smack dab in the middle of Nowhere, Northwestern USA,
as in the case of Bird Box.

There's a respectable internal logic to A Quiet Place's conclusion
: After a noisy battle with one aurally enhanced alien beast, it stands to
reason that other aurally enhanced alien beasts might hustle on over to see
what's shakin'. Emily Blunt cocks her shotgun.
Millicent Simmonds
  readies her sound amplifying doohickey. Cut to credits. But the ending of
Bird Box defies such logic in favor of contrivance, which isn't the fault of
the film per se; director Susanne Bier and writer Eric Heisserer merely
adapted the story from the 2014 Josh Malerman novel of the same name,
condensing its plot and swapping its setting for the sake of economy and a
stronger visual palette. (The American northwest is ever so much more
striking than
Detroit.) It's not their original work. So when Malorie (Sandra Bullock) and
her two kids, Girl (Vivien Lyra Blair) and Boy (Julian Edwards), arrive at
the formerly disused, newly inhabited Janet Tucker School for the Blind,
that's in keeping with Malerman's intention.

But Malerman at least made blindness a choice. In his book, the survivors
Malorie encounters in the greenhouse safe haven she's been searching for
have blinded themselves on purpose, having realized that blindness makes
them immune to the insane wiles of the eldritch, invisible creatures
haunting Earth.
In Bier's movie, well, the people she meets are presumably blind by natural
causes, whether they were born blind or became blind in life. On its own,
that's not a particularly big ask, but coupled with that whole "school for
the blind" thing, and Bird Box's climax reads as aggressively convenient.
Who builds a place of learning for blind people in the middle of the woods?
Near a raging river ? Totally separated from all civilization?

Maybe Bier simply didn't have the time or the budget to pull back and show
us that Janet Tucker did in fact have the good sense to built her school
adjacent to highways, emergency services, and other essential amenities of
modern day living. But Bird Box shows us no such accomodations, and gives no
such consideration to her residents' impairment; put bluntly, the creative
decision making here is straight-up bizarre, and that's not even getting
into the function of the building itself, wrapped around an atrium that's
covered by tree branches. Apparently, fauna's enough of a barrier to keep
the whispering, malevolent entities tormenting the planet out of an enclosed
space. If only someone had run that by the cast earlier and saved them the
time and effort of slapping newspapers over every window in sight.

Bird Box wraps up too neatly, too cleanly, with too much security; if the
magical leaf blockade that wards off evil (but also somehow lets in ample
light for all the survivors who aren't blind!) isn't enough, then let the
appearance of Dr. Lapham (Parminder Nagra), Malorie's OB-GYN, last seen
admonishing our hero against drinking while pregnant, serve as the
punctuation mark to the film's artifice. 
Everyone's happy and snug beneath the treetops; the story forms a complete
circuit.
Not that that'd stop Netflix from funding a sequel, mind you. If a sequel
can be spun out of A Quiet Place , a sequel can be spun out of Bird Box, no
matter the narrative gymnastics required to make it happen.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/bird-box-ending-explained-how-
movie-changed-book-worse-1173171 


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